incredibly detailed but nonetheless vague scrambled memories stemming from silent lunch [life-writing, 2]

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do you know about silent lunch? did you have silent lunch???

silent lunch. a punitive measure i’ve not even thought to remember in decades. something so stupid (or traumatic?), i’d apparently erased it from both my experience and my brain. 

but then a student mentioned it and it was like WOW. and now i’ve spent the last week asking everyone i know if they know about silent lunch and it’s like WOW.

what a bunch of boisterous troublemakers we must’ve been, to have had to be silenced, all us little kids.

(fashion is a journey, yo [1988?])
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my life with jackie, redux; or, on melancholy

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it is like a nesting doll, all of it. my life with jackie, my writing about jackie. so that when i read the pages i have written about jackie, the whole book i have written on her life, it unpacks a whole series of memories of my own.

where i was when i wrote that sentence.

who i was sitting next to at the british library when i found that quote. (invariably, always, obviously, nanette.)

what i didn’t know was about to happen when i was in that archive.

the feeling of the wind in my hair and the blue blue sky above as i walked home after wandering round the yacht.

it is her life and it is mine.

they are, by this point, so braided up. Continue reading →

my life with jackie

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it is like a nesting doll, my life with jackie. a series of anniversaries, each now saturated in its own memories.

because when you write about someone else, you are ultimately writing about yourself.

when you write about someone for twenty-five years, writing about that person is actually you living your life. Continue reading →